That an endless cycle. You give your time and money to a 'smaller' company (thinking they're not as evil), but soon they become big corporations and start doing the same kind of things. :)

I switched search engines several times, had no problem with it. If you're afraid of abstinence syndrome, you can rotate them: monday - searx, tuesday - qwant, wednesday - mojeek, thursday - duck, friday - yandex, saturday - ecosia, sunday - gibiru.

Oh, I'm not thrilled to have Microsoft track me. Google disturbs me much more, though, mainly because their footprint is larger (Youtube, Gmail, etc).

Also, I don't live on Windows, which limits the amount of my data MS can get its hands on.

And with a pi-hole, you can easily block all windows telemetry domains. Which is about half of the requests on the DNS at our house...